The man who discovered Elvis… and then destroyed him: How the King spiralled into addiction and death at the hands of his high-rolling manager – revealed in bombshell biography by a writer who saw it happen

Addiction was the glue that kept Elvis Presley and his manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker together in the last few years of the singer’s life.

Twenty -year fame and wild extravagance meant that Elvis had fought to end until 1977. He had to continue the tour to pay for the compatible doctors who feed the surroundings and the drugs he was attached to him.

You may think that a logical, loving manager will undertake a hospital to dry his client. However, ‘Colonel’ had a problem of addiction. When he did not go on a tour with his ‘son’, he would refer to Elvis, and he would continue his gambling bing on the roulette wheel in Las Vegas.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed their fingers. Elvis had to continue working to pay its own profile, as well as gambling losses of his manager.

During his 21 -year career, Elvis won millions and until 1977, the Colonel received 50 percent for him. Then the Colonel had side cuts.

Elvis did not write a song, but the author would be asked to leave a percentage of the royal family to make him record one. Thus, as a singer, his copyright took one -third of Elvis’s music companies Heartbreak Hotel and hundreds of other songs, and the Colonel always takes some of Elvis’s slices.

However, in Elvis’s career, songwriters began to dig their heels. He wanted to record, I will always love you, but the writer and singer Dolly Parton would not allow him. He knew the value of his song.

Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker is one of the 30-person films in this dream set in 1962.

Then there were films of 30 people with Elvis. Although the Colonel has no role in the production of the films, his side cuts made him an office and all of them pay more.

He was a cunning man, okay, but he was exactly the ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker ‘?

It wasn’t a colonel for a start. This honorary Soubriquet was given to him by the governors of the two states while working as a supporter. He loved it. He made him feel important.

He wasn’t American either. Actually, they were the Dutch. Andreas Cornelis Van Kuijk was born in the Netherlands in 1909, entered America as a Stowaway in the 1920s, where Huntington adopted the Tom Parker identity from West Virginia.

A short career followed in the US Army, which required to lose the Dutch citizenship, and as a result, it made it stateless because the US did not receive citizenship.

At the summit of Elvis’s career, he was wondering why his manager never visited him while serving with the US army in Germany, or why the singer didn’t visit England. Both would be impossible because Parker had no passports.

For 30 years, Parker worked with the country stars Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow in the tour carnivals in the small South towns of the United States before moving to music administration. Then, in 1955, one day, he saw a young man unknown in Louisiana and saw his future.

However, the child’s parents took some time and very cunning schmoozing. But within a year, Elvis was on national television. A year later, he was the most famous young man in the world.

Peter Gurelnick’s Colonel and King

When I had breakfast with Parker in Las Vegas in 1968 (he said: ‘I won’t take the sequel because I don’t want you to look at me’) I was confused with his little accent. However, as Gurralnick explained in this study of Parker’s relationship with Elvis, the Colonel made great efforts to hide his history, and he will never see his mother again.

However, the Colonel’s, copies of each contract, and a perfect Elvis historian to save every letter for the Gurelnick.

He tells Hollywood producers and record company executives how to do their jobs in a quarter million words.

For Gurnick, this makes you think that the Colonel is a good ruler. I do not agree. In my opinion, Colonel is a bright supporter, especially in the early days of Elvis’s success, but desperate to guide a smart path through Hollywood.

It was always a million dollar agreements for Parker. At any point, in all letters, we do not see the evidence of a more thoughtful ambition. The opposite.

Although Parker never intervened in what Elvis said, he never read film scripts.

Elvis was probably the most popular star in Hollywood when he left the army in 1960. A series of cheap movies (eg. Girl Happy, Harem Holiday and Paradise, Hawai style), usually worse than dialogue, and the parcels admitted to Elvis as a joke in Hollywood in a few years.

During an interview in Las Vegas, he said to me, ‘I wouldn’t be honest with you if I was not ashamed of some of the movies I was in and some of the songs I had to sing.’ “ I want to say they are good, but I can’t. I had to do them. I signed contracts. ‘

However, the contracts were only related to money. While Elvis was talking to me, the Colonel listened quietly. Can you imagine that the agents of Paul Newman or Frank Sinatra have signed their customers in movies without reading scenarios? Thinking is not made.

This story has no happy ending. The man, whom they call the king died in 1977 when his addiction had a heart attack in Graceland bathroom.

The Colonel’s addiction never left him, but after Elvis’s death, he was no longer a high roll. When a Memphis Court was abandoned when he eliminated the administration of Elvis, he was damaged, and lived in a Las Vegas house for 20 years.

However, although he still visited casinos, his $ 25 bets were his limit.

• Peter Guralnick by Colonel and King (White Rabbit, £ 35, 624PP)